Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

John Dryden

I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric...

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

John Lubbock

Happy indeed is the naturalist: to him the seasons come round like old friends; to him the birds sing: as he walks along, the flowers stretch out from the hedges, or look up from the ground, and as each year fades away, he looks back on a fresh store of happy memories.

John Locke

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.

John Locke

It is reported of that prodigy of parts, Monsieur Pascal, that till the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought, in any part of his rational age. This is a privilege so little known to most men, that it seems almost incredible to those who, after the ordinary way, measure all others by themselves; but yet, when considered, may help us to enlarge our thoughts towards greater perfections of it, in superior ranks of spirits.

John Locke

The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.

John Lennon

For a long time I wasn't listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty. It would bring back memories I didn't want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I'm not alive 'cause I'm not making it. And if it was good, I hated it 'cause I wasn't doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious 'cause I could've done it better...

John Lancaster Spalding

To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.

John Lancaster Spalding

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

John le Carre

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

John Lahr

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

John Knowles

Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.

John Banville

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Jodie Foster

My earliest memories are doing commercials and TV.

Jim Shaw

I can never remember names. I'm so self-centered and have a terrible memory...

Joanna Russ

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

Jim Rohn

A well-fashioned day - with a beginning and an end, a purpose and a content, a color and a character, a feel and a texture - takes it place among the many and becomes a valuable memory and treasure. At midnight the winged messengers come and gather up all these pieces and take them off to wherever the mosaic is kept. And surely, on occasion, one messenger says to another, 'Wait 'til you see this one.'

Jim Rohn

Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory.

Jim Rohn

Be a collector of good ideas, but don't trust your memory. The best collecting place for all of the ideas and information that comes your way is your journal.

Jim Rohn

If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down.

George Lopez

Memories, priceless. Well not really priceless, but there you go!

It's a special day, win or lose. I have a lot of memories of Opening Day that are all very special.

John Mayall

They're steppingstones, markers to whatever's going on in your life, at that moment, ... There's no pain in any of them. They're memories and recollections of time we spent together as musicians, and the stories that were going on at the time. They're diaries, really. They all have pleasant memories.

Red Schoendienst

There's a lot of memories here. No question about it.

David Brooks

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

David Mitchell

Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

David Mitchell

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Carl Sagan

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Charles Caleb Colton

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

Charles Stross

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Alan Watts

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.